[dns_snek]

99.999% of businesses don't publish APKs or upload them to F-Droid. Expecting people to use third party distribution mechanisms like Aurora store is entirely unreasonable.

As for "working around" it, it's ridiculous to impose that expectation on the general population. Sure, you and I will always be able to find a way to hack around restrictions, but it's inaccessible to the overwhelming majority of the population.

[smeej]

What is unreasonable about showing people there's another interface to access all the apps in the Google Play Store, where you can download and use all of them without signing into a Google account?

[aembleton]

Because Google could flip a switch and stop that at any moment. There is a systemic problem with how society is becoming more and more reliant upon a few large tech firms. Work arounds will work whilst they're small enough and fly under the radar, but if they get larger they'll be stopped by the holders of the binaries.

[rex_gallorum2]

We're increasingly like animals that become dependent on a single source of food or a single watering hole. It's really risky. You could hardly design more fragile systems (or business models) that depend in these very narrow bottlenecks.

[smeej]

So we should...submit to the binary already, in case the binary closes the loophole? How is that a solution?